Friday, we took a train from Gare Austerlitz in Paris to Brive-la-Gaillarde in southwestern France (it's the Perigord or Dordogne region). We entertained ourselves on the train ride by watching episodes of 24 on Eric's PSP.
In Brive, we picked up our rental car, which turned out to be an Audi 4-door hatchback. The nicest woman (with the cutest little 4-month-old golden retriever puppy) who worked at a little convenience store, helped give us directions to Le Bugue (the town our cottage was in) from Brive. Thank goodness for that lady because we forgot our huge packet of info that Simply Perigord (the company who rents the cottages) had mailed to us a few weeks prior...
So we were off to attempt driving a stick through a small French town, finding the right highway, navigating a million round-abouts and getting to the Simply Perigord office on time to pick up our cottage key. I killed the engine a few times on the way out of town... the stick said that reverse was where first gear usually is, so I was trying hard to not accidentally start in reverse. It confused me, and as I learned later, I was killing the engine because I was accidentally starting in third gear.
Anyway....Eric did a great job navigating. Really amazing since we started out not knowing where we were at all. Unfortunately, we went past our exit on the main highway and ended up having to navigate through smaller country roads to backtrack. At one point, while attempting a 3-point turn (with the front of the car right near the edge of a 15 ft or more drop off into a huge ditch/cliff), I couldn't figure out how the heck to get the car in reverse -- I kept pushing the stick all the way to the left and up, just like the little picture said, but it would not work. Eric thought it'd be a good idea to just get out and push the car backwards while it was in neutral, but I had terrible visions of me killing my husband on only our 7th day of marriage. So that idea was thrown out. I tried once again to go in reverse, only to make the tires spin forward and almost propel me off the cliff. At this point, I freaked out and told Eric "you do it!" (although I knew that he had never driven a stick before).
This is where we have our friend Tim Kurt to thank. He had just told us a story about his stick-driving problems in England, so Eric tried pulling the stick up and then pushing it in/down. It worked! FYI...in a European manual car, it is tricky to find reverse! If Eric hadn't tried that, our car would probably still be in a ditch/off a cliff. After that, I did much better with reverse and starting in first gear.
We finally made it to Le Bugue and were very happy to find our cottage. It is adorable. We were very happy to find ourselves in the country with fresh air and animal sounds - birds, roosters, the occasional cow. After settling in a bit, we took the car in to town to the Intermarche (kind of like Walmart - groceries and random other stuff) for some groceries. It was awesome - we bought a couple bottles of wine that were only like 3 Euros each, Eric got some Cognac and then we got some breakfast, lunch and dinner supplies - all for just a bit more than what we had paid for dinners in Paris. That night, we made a simple pasta/veggie dinner at home accompanied by a baguette and cheese and wine.I definitely deserved the wine that night! It helped me de-stress!
Here are some more pictures of our cottage:
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